


tear you apart

by cakecakecake



Series: wanna do bad things with you [4]
Category: Villainous (Cartoon)
Genre: Ambiguous Black Hat Origin, Ambiguous Relationships, Because I Was Horny, Black Hat with HORNS, Demonic Possession, Dream Sex, Dubious Consent, Ectobiology, Ex-Villain Reader, Extremely Dubious Consent, F/M, Monster sex, Obsession, Psychological Horror, Reader-Insert, Sleep Sex, Stalking, Supernatural Elements, Surreal, Tentacles, ambiguous time period
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-17
Updated: 2018-10-29
Packaged: 2019-08-03 07:59:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,711
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16322294
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cakecakecake/pseuds/cakecakecake
Summary: you can run but you can't hide.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> really just wanted to do ex-villain!reader/black hat nastiness bc i'm sure he'd be absolutely merciless if a once faithful ally turned tail and tried to be a heroic threat to him instead ahuhuhu

You don't tell him you're leaving. 

You rip up your card and you blot out your name in the Big Black Book. You pack your things. (You can't do this anymore.)

The clack of your heels echo down the empty corridor and stop in front of the door to his office. You mutter a word of goodbye that he won't hear as you brush your hands across the gold nameplate, your red nails tracing the tiny hat-shaped engraving. A streak of lightning flashes from a nearby window, jolting you from your moment of bereavement. The taxi's not going to wait forever. 

*

It's cold enough that you can see your breath, yet you're still outside the bar with your flimsy coat shrugged tightly around your shoulders as you take another long drag of your cigarette. You feel childish, running out at the sound of a silly _song_ , of all things, but the piano man had started playing a tune you just couldn't bear to listen to: a Sinatra favorite, one that you'd heard on repeat back in your early days at the organization. Flug had played it so often it'd almost ruined the vinyl. You exhale smoke, watching the shapes swirl about and dissipate. You can't stand thinking about it. Hot tears threaten to streak down your powdered cheeks and you start sniffling. 

"There, there."

Your mouth pops open in a harsh gasp as you nearly drop your cigarette. A too familiar ghastly tendril curls around from behind you to stick it back between your lips.

"Black Hat," you breathe in, stepping backward. His one eye gleams in the shadows, familiar impish grin stretching wide across his horrid face.

"Good evening, my dear," he greets you with a pleasant hum, like you hadn't just up and left his institution without so much as a farewell. "It's been some time, hasn't it?"

Eyes wide in terror, you feel the tears starting to fall. 

"Got a light?" he asks you plainly, tilting his head. You reach in your coat pocket. He waves his hand, a cloud of dark smoke swirling to make a fat cigar appear at his fingertips.

"Be a doll, won't you?" He inches forward, leaning in close enough for you to hear the rumble of his throaty breaths. You do as he's asked, lighting it.

"How did you find -- " you start, but he wags his finger, brows arched. 

“ _How_ , she says,” he mutters, amused with himself. "Well for one thing, you’re not very good at hiding."

You huff out a hollow laugh. "If you knew where I've been, then why...?"

Black Hat bows his head, taking a long drag of his cigar. The smoke curls around the angles of his shadowy face. "To see if I could be wrong about you."

"What do you mean?" you ask him, trying to hide the quiver in your voice but of course he notices, he always does -- 

"Don't play _dumb_ with me, girl, you're bad at it." You wince, knowing how hard he's fighting to keep his voice even. "I watch the news, you know. I didn't want to think you'd left, let alone try to _conspire_ against me with these despicable heroic vermin -- " 

You take one last drag before putting your cigarette out on the bottom of your heel. "I told you, in the very beginning, that I was going to do whatever I had to -- "

" -- and you _knew_ , from the very beginning, what signing your name in the Black Book meant," he growls malevolently, his gruesome teeth centimeters away from your neck as he seizes your arm. You laugh through oncoming tears, trembling in his too-tight grasp.

"Have you come to bargain, then?" You ask him sheepishly, half-joking. You know he doesn't care about your loyalty -- no, that's not what this is about. 

"My darling, I'm a businessman," he chortles, snaking a ghostly tendril around your waist. "And a good businessman makes deals, not bargains."

"Then what did you come to tell me?"

"Just to remind you," he purrs in mock seduction, his serpentine tongue grazing the shell of your ear, "that I may have revoked your membership, but..."

You feel your face fall, remembering. 

" _I still have your soul_."

*

He doesn’t follow you home. (You don’t think.) (You don’t let yourself think.)

Weeks go by after that night without you noticing anything strange. It’s foolish to believe he’s left you alone, but it's possible that he might have. Black Hat is an important man, he’s got a business to manage -- better things to do than meddle with humans like you, you’re sure. You lay low after your encounter, taking care to make sure your cohorts are leaving your name out of things, turning down interviews and avoiding curious journalists who are just _dying_ to hear about how you've reformed. You dye your hair, you buy some new clothes, you keep moving. You'd leave the city, but Hatsville needs you -- perhaps not you in particular, but it needs heroes, and you're doing your best. Things are peaceful for a long while.

But after a time, there are moments, when you’re coming home or going to the store. Little flickers of a second where you'll see an oddly dark shape just barely out of the corner of your eye. Sometimes you’ll think you've just heard someone calling your name from down the block, or see someone waving at you just across the street, but they vanish before you can even register their presence. You shrug it off -- everybody gets those kind of moments. It's not anything people think twice about. You figure you won’t give it much thought.

Until the day you glance up at the roof of your apartment complex and see the outline of -- 

You blink, shading your eyes with your hand as you look again. You squint. It’s bright and you can’t see anything with the sun glaring at you, but you’re sure you’d just seen -- no. It’s nothing.

You spin on your heels and hurry your way to the train, clutching your scarf a bit tighter. The chill of the wind is biting as you duck behind an old hospital. You can take the long way, it's fine. Everything is fine. There was nothing there, you'd checked, but something won't let you shake the feeling of being _watched_.


	2. Chapter 2

You know you’re dreaming. 

Lucid and clear. 

You feel your eyes open to darkness, to nothing. (The Nothing.)

There’s nothing that you can see, but you can _feel_ \-- a weight, around your ankles, binding your wrists. You’re unsure if it carries you or you it. It’s not too heavy, it’s comfortable and familiar. On top of you. Cold. (You know this feeling.) 

You blink. Nothing still. You realize you’re lying down, recognize the plush beneath you. (A bed?) This doesn’t feel like your bedroom -- something tightens around your limbs, pulling you into a stretch and then they snap -- gone. There’s a different weight on you now, settling on your stomach. You roll around, sitting up, but something you can’t see pushes you back down. A hold on your neck. You should be afraid, but you start giggling.

_“Choke me.”_

Something winds itself about your waist and hips and thighs: a cool, slippery softness. Leaving a trail of shadowy, inky darkness. You open your mouth. An invitation. An icy wetness slips inside it and you _suck_. 

Your lips stretch over the frozen tendril, tongue rolling over it as if you could melt it in your mouth. You grapple with it, the grip on your neck tightening. More of these icy sticklers stretch across your body, tendril connecting tendril, a web of wet shadows. Entangling you. Shrouding you, threatening to swallow you whole. You’re blinded, breathing becoming such a chore in this struggle. You’re enveloped, trapped, but the slick oil sack you’re stuck in feels like coming home. 

_“Mine.”_

The word is a ghost of a whisper, treading along the shell of your ear before sticking at the far back of your mind. _“Mine.”_ You know this voice. It’s never left your head. A heavy grating, resonant and rich and mesmerizing and completely inhuman. Lusting for you in much the same way as a beast would for blood. 

Your breath hitches. 

“Black Hat -- "

A gravelly chortle seems to buzz from the inside of your skull. You ball your fists in your hair, grasping at your scalp to make it _stop, please, stop, please get out of my head_ \-- but he’s there. He’s always been there. He’s never left. 

_“You can’t hide from me.”_

You’re awake. 

You bolt upright, freezing sweat crawling down your face, your neck as you gasp for air. You can’t remember having fallen asleep at all -- your magazine is still spread open to the middle on your lap, the reading lamp still switched on. The swinging tail of your Felix the Cat clock ticks softly in a steadying rhythm, sobering -- it’s not even seven o’ clock. Head aching, you peek at the light from the dying sunset seeping in through the cracks of the cheap blinds. Sirens and horns whistle and holler miles away; the drunk chatter and laughter of your younger neighbors is just close enough to make you feel less alone. You scramble off the couch, stumbling over your own feet as you tell yourself you were dreaming, just dreaming.

You hurry down the hall to your kitchen in search of your cigarette case, relieved to find it on the counter where you’d left it. You grab it and a lighter and push open the door to the balcony and light it, puffing out smoke into the muggy summer air with the faint ticking of the old clock offering comfort and reassurance.

Black Hat is not here and has not been here, he does not know this place -- and even if he had, or he does, it’s clear that he doesn’t care to find you. He could do so, easily, he’s proved that, but that’s only if he wanted to. And clearly, he doesn’t want to, or else he would have by now. He’s said all he’s needed to say, done what he’s already wanted to do. _“I still have your soul.”_ You huff out a small laugh.

If that’s true, how is it you’re still living? It’s not like with Flug -- powerful scientist though he is, he is still a servant in a way that you never were. Whatever he did with _his_ soul, it made Flug different, turned him into something else -- yet you are still you. Flesh and bone and beating heart, even if your soul is not yours anymore -- but you still feel that it burns. Not within you, but somewhere, bright and hot and unyielding. Powerful. Whatever Black Hat’s done with it, you’ve no idea, but you find solace in knowing that it’s still there, somewhere. Flug doesn’t share that same solace and you can’t imagine anyone else does. You hang onto the hope that someday, when someone much braver and much stronger than you takes him down for good, you can have it back. Until then, you remain in the shadows. You scheme and spy and hunt and pray, pray that he never catches you, because you don’t know what you’ll do if he does. He can't know about your power.

You finish your cigarette, digging the end into the ashtray and watching the street lights come on. You consider lighting another one when someone calls your name from right below.

“Jimmy?” You call back, craning your neck over the railing. Smiling with a wave, your handsome neighbor calls your name again.

“Say, you busy tonight?” he asks you, cheerful and peppy, a melodic lilt to his smooth baritone. “Got time for a drink?”

“Depends,” you flirt back, playful and kittenish, “you buying?”

Jimmy flashes a grin back up at you before shyly bowing his head. “What kinda gentleman would I be if I didn’t offer?”

You purse your lips, arching a brow. “I’ll be down in five.” 

*

The bar is packed shoulder to shoulder with thick clouds of smoke hazing over the hanging lamps. You and Jimmy pass cigarettes back and forth between the two of you, coughing out laughs and clinking glasses of wine together. When you’d fantasized about your first date with him this scenario was not in the realm of your imagination, but you’re not complaining by any means. He’s being so talkative and charming, so different from the reserved librarian you’ve been admiring from across the parking lot in this crisp dress-shirt and tie rather than his usual sweater vest and loafers. You have half a mind to remark on it, but some teeny, tiny voice in the back of your mind tells you that’s a bad idea and the last thing you want to do is sour the moment.

So you keep drinking and smoking and flirting, until you see the glint in the dark of his eyes that you’ve been aching to see and invite him back to your place. You barely get to shut the door behind you before his mouth takes yours in a hungry, longing kiss.

It’s like a fire blazing in the pit of your gut; his lips on yours spark a wild flame that fans throughout your frame, burning your nerve endings and sizzling at your fingertips as you wind your hands in his dark hair. He groans into your mouth, shoving you against the wall as his hands claw at your dress. He towers over you, broad and strong and stiff and you feel that prickling far at the edge of your mind again, his skin suddenly rough and clammy under your hands, his hair thinning out between your fingers. You keep kissing him like you’re starved, because you are, it’s been so long, you haven’t since -- so you keep at it, blaming your fear and paranoia for trying to ruin your moment as you feel him lift you. (Is Jimmy really this strong?) 

He carries you down the hall and keeps kissing your neck and you realize you haven’t told him where your bedroom is -- he just guesses, it seems. You heave and gasp and let him pin you to your mattress, eager to claw off his shirt and he helps you yank off his tie. He grabs your face and straddles you, kissing you harder, biting at your lip and ouch, _fuck_ , he snags you -- you taste the tang of blood.

“Jimmy,” you laugh out, nervously, shrugging the shirt off his shoulders, “Be a little careful, would ya, Jimmy?”

He lifts his head to peer at you in your dim room, narrowing his eyes at you in a way that strikes you a little uncomfortable, but you don’t linger on it -- probably just anxious or frustrated. When you’ve been hungry for something so long it’s easy to lose a little bit of control. You smile encouragingly, grazing your red nails across the curve of his jaw before kissing him again with fervor. He returns the enthusiasm tenfold, grinding his hips down against you, deeper into the mattress and you yelp, excited and admittedly a little frightened. It doesn’t seem quite right that he’s so strong, but again. Adrenaline and libido and all that, they can do crazy things to people. Being horny is a lot like being drunk, you say and you do things you wouldn’t normally feel right doing, that you wouldn’t get away with sober. 

You strip off your dress completely and he lets his big hands roam across the bare expanse of your chest and stomach, tracing the little scars here and there, palming at your lace-covered breasts. He trails his thumbs along the trim of your brassiere before dipping his head down, planting kisses along your waistline and then further south, teasing the peaks of your tits and coaxing giggles out of you before glancing up to ask permission to go further and it’s then, that you see it -- 

A glint, the faintest spark of a crackling ember in his eyes, burning gold and crimson -- a hypnotic, terrifying gleam that you’ve only seen before in --

“What’s wrong?” he asks you, smirk vanishing as quickly as it crawled across his face. He sounds so innocent suddenly, as if he knows what you saw, that you saw, if only for a second -- 

“Nothing,” you apologize, heart leaping as he teases you through the fabric. “It’s nothing, keep going -- "

He licks his lips, happy to oblige. He mouths at your opening, his hot breath searing through the cotton and he digs his nails into your ass and hips. Wetness pools at your core as your jaw drops, a howl of a moan escaping your throat as he teases you mercilessly. Eyes fluttered shut, you claw at your bed sheets, not even noticing the lights in your room cutting out and plunging you both into a familiar pitfall of black. 

Even as you’re still covered, his mouth and tongue feel divine against your folds, the heat wild enough to drive you mad. It feels too good, too big, too warm -- the shape of his tongue feeling impossibly saurian, like it’s forked. You jerk your hips into his face, your eyes still screwed shut as you beg him to please, please take off what little clothing you have left on, and he indulges you with a foreign graveling growl. You feel sharp teeth graze at your skin as he pulls off your panties just enough to expose your leaking cunt, dripping a wet pool underneath your ass as you spill for him.

“So wet already,” he murmurs just barely loud enough for you to hear, not quite so for you to register that it’s not --

“Jimmy, please,” you beg, arching your back, lost to your sore need to be fucked. “Please, get inside me -- “

So his tongue finally, finally meets your cunt. Flattens against your bundle of nerves and makes you cry out from the sudden pressure and heat, your head throbbing with an ache not quite on par with the one below. Like being plunged into a fishbowl -- your head is so heavy. You think you’ve opened your eyes, or maybe not, you can’t see anything now -- but you can hardly care about that when you can _feel_ , you can feel so _much_ , such an exhilarating bliss just from being touched. 

You jerk your hips, twitching in his tightening grasp, the pinch of his nails in your skin piercing as his elongated tongue drives in and out of you. Sopping wet and slick. Your voice feels and sounds detached from you as you moan and sigh, like it’s somewhere across the room rather than in your own throat, resonating in the walls and the floorboards. He’s fallen silent, quiet except for the noises his body is making to pleasure yours. You can feel the flickering and flexing of the muscles in his tongue as it works inside your walls and you squeeze it, fighting to catch your breath as you’re lost to your bliss. It’s as if a fog has misted your mind. You can think of nothing that isn’t your pleasure, nothing that isn’t your desire, nothing that isn’t -- 

“ _Black Hat_ ,” you whine desperately, wrapping your fingers about his horns, not realizing until he lifts his head that this man between your legs is --

“Black Hat,” you say again, voice hardly a whisper. Your former master is grinning at you, your juices dripping down his horrifically handsome face.

“Took you long enough,” he teases, licking his lips. 

“What have you done with Jimmy?” you quiver, confused and horrified and disgusted and absolutely _agonized_ by how unreasonably horny you still are.

“Possessed him, eviscerated him, disposed of him, and impersonated him,” he replies, so plainly and so obviously bored. “Why, are you really going to pretend as if you care?”

“You _killed_ him, of course I care,” you choke back a sob, the foggy haze in your head starting to dissipate. 

“You didn’t when I was drinking your cunt ten seconds ago -- “

“You’re a fucking monster,” you say hollowly, tears streaming down your cheeks. That weight, that pull you’d felt in the dream -- it’s returning, binding you at your ankles, at your wrists. The slippery dark tendrils are winding around your waist and Black Hat is smiling madly down at you, beautiful and terrifying and mesmerizing --

“And you’re _fucking_ a monster,” he taunts you, thrusting a cold phantom back into your folds and you jerk, feeling it so deep inside you it might as well have pushed into your stomach. You howl through gritted teeth, hating yourself because it feels _good_ , so good, just like it used to --

“Not anymore,” you try to defy him, but he sees. Right through you. Always has. He clicks his tongue, diving back between your legs, drawing another euphoric screech out of you. His voice comes to you in the stuffy space between your ears, in the back of your head -- 

“Bad at hiding, bad at lying,” he scolds you, his poisonous voice enrapturing, seducing you. “To think, you were once my favorite agent…”

“N-No, don’t, please don’t,” you plead with him, plead with your body to stop betraying you, stop succumbing -- you know this game, you've already tried it. You know what he’s doing. You can’t give in. But it’s so warm and tight and the pressure is _just right_ \-- 

“Of all the subordinates I’ve had, you were the only one who got anywhere close to making me feel even a scrap of sentimentality,” he whispers deliciously. The inky shadows are webbing along your skin, encompassing you in a pulsating heat. Maddeningly soft and tight. You’re dripping wet. His tongue is darting in and out of you so quickly. A phantom pressure is pounding at your clit.

You groan, hips jerking as you clench your jaw. “You’re lying…”

“ **I don’t lie** ,” he growls, the echo of something you’ve heard only in nightmares jolts you near out of your skin, but he falls calm again, venomously alluring again, “I was so fascinated with you, so appreciative of your dedication to the humble beginnings of our organization. The night you left had nearly broken my heart…”

“You don’t have a heart,” you struggle to laugh, writhing underneath the now vibrating mass of darkness that keeps plunging into you, fucking you -- you hate that you love how this feels, that you remember the nights he’d done this to you before -- 

He laughs. He raises his magnificent head and the tangle of shadows evanescence into nothingness. You sit up, suddenly, a crippling despair washing over you as the suffocating pleasure suddenly vanishes. The loss of contact both agonizes and relieves you. You blink and he disappears and you don’t know where you are. You’re still undressed, but no longer at home -- it dawns on you that you must not have been at home to begin with.

You stand in the darkness, hardwood floors creaking beneath you as you step forward. Smell of cedarwood and pine. The crackling of a fireplace. Familiar jazzy tune echoing faintly down the corridor.

“Black Hat,” you hear yourself say, and you whirl around, mouth popping open in a harsh gasp.

There he stands, here in his own room, coat tails and leather gloves and woolen top hat to conceal the true nature of his hellish existence underneath. The patter of rain against the window and dim amber glow of the desk lamp is enough to stoke the fire you thought had quelled in your chest. 

“It was in this room that you first reminded me of that,” he starts, striding toward you, towering and frightening and disgustingly beautiful. His gaze is locked on your mortified face, advancing. His long legs make his steps seem quicker. He pulls the gloves off his wrists with his shining fangs. You want to move, you want to run, but you’re rooted to the spot. You couldn’t flee if you tried. You no longer have the choice to. 

You stare up at his face, still nearly naked and shivering, wild-eyed but tired. You don’t want to fight but you don’t want to be here. He reaches for your hand, his enormous claw calloused and so rough against your soft, pliable fingers and palm. He presses it against his chest. 

He does what you’d dreaded and wished for all at once. He bends his head, cupping your chin with his other hand, and he kisses you, passionate and poignant and it’s overwhelmingly intoxicating. You feel drunk and dizzy, swaying enough on the spot that you need to cling to him to keep yourself steady. You slip your tongue in his dangerous mouth, carefully gliding along his serpent tongue and the maddened and sickened poison of his essence makes you want to _stay, stay, you never should have left, he wants you, he wants you_ \--

You wrench yourself from him only to groan out a moan. The phantoms return, winding and tying themselves around you and you welcome them, arching into their oily slick touches. You feel your back against the wall and he pins you against it, still holding your hand against his chest. His coat drops to the floor. His tie is hanging loosely around his neck. The lacing of his corset is pulled loose and there’s a swell in his dress pants pressing hard against your crotch. You want to touch him. More than anything, you want to touch him, but you know if you do it’ll be the same as before -- 

“Nothing,” he hisses at you, glaring down into your eyes. You ball your fist in his unbuttoned, silken shirt. “You kissed me here. You let me fuck you here.”

His words drip against your skin, falling into the bowl of your collarbone and you wish you could evaporate like they do there. You tremble against him, feeling your wetness dripping down your thighs as the tendrils once again make a home out of tormenting your pining body. Black Hat drops his jaw to let his forked tongue slip out and slide up your neck, trailing searing hot slime along your burning skin. He reaches to slip into your flushed folds and you whimper, shaking, biting down on your lip to keep from opening your mouth to say something you’ll regret, something like _please, fuck me, just one more time, take me one more time_ \--

But you don’t have to ask. 

He unbuttons the front of his pants. You don’t want to look at it. You remember. When you open your eyes it’s only to look at his face. His gruesome, beautiful face. 

The chill of the ectoplasmic tentacle is a jarring contrast to the oscillating pulse of the shadow tendrils, but the walls of your cunt swallow it anyway, clenching around it hard enough to make Black Hat growl. He braces himself against the wall, pushing harder into you as he buries the appendage deeper inside. The shadows hold you so tight in place, the only thing you can move is your one hand, still gripping the fistful of his shirt. It’s useless to resist. Your body craves it, but you know it’s wrong. It was always wrong. You never should have done this. 

“But it feels _so good_ , doesn’t it?” Like he can read your mind. You gasp, muscles twitching as he keeps driving in and out of you. “Yes, I can see your innermost desires. I’ve known from the very beginning. What you really wanted...oh, it destroyed you when you realized you couldn’t have it…”

You writhe and jerk in the webbing, the tendrils around your neck tightening as you cough and sputter. “No...No, I never told you…”

“You didn’t need to,” he chortles, fucking into you with hard snaps of his hips. “You thought you were so clever, and I’ll give you that, it could have worked if I had been weak -- ”

“What do you think I was doing?” you shudder, the crest of your climax so near you can already feel the shocks rocking to your core -- 

“You sold yourself to me as a spy, someone who could retrieve valuable information on my enemies, but you -- slipped -- up,” he teases, punctuating with each thrust, the pulses of the tendrils almost unbearable -- 

“What are you playing at,” you could cry, you’re so close now, any second --

“You thought you had something more powerful than me, but in the end, I’m always right about love,” he practically purrs, giving you one last thrust to send you over the edge. You crash into your climax, choking and convulsing and falling to the floor as all of the phantoms instantly retract before bursting into smoke. 

“Black Hat,” you groan, shaking to get to your hands and knees, watching the plasmic tentacle retreat back into the confines of his pants. He shifts around, reaching behind him to pull tight the lacing of his corset again. “Tell me what you’re getting at…what are you talking about…”

He bellows out laughter, the demonic echo ringing off the walls as you feel the space around you start to shrink. The room shifts and you’re plunged into the pitch black again, with nothing, nothing except for him, only Black Hat -- 

“You thought you were going to manipulate me,” he explains, clearly frustrated that he has to, because you know, you already know, but there’s something else, something he can’t wait to get to -- you swallow thickly, still shuddering from your orgasm, almost afraid he’s considering giving you another as he advances on you again. “You have a unique gift, my dear, something I see in humans maybe once every century or two -- the power to fabricate love.”

You clasp your hand over your mouth and squeeze your eyes shut. 

“You manipulate feelings, arouse affections in others, like a walking, talking love potion,” he goes on, pacing, relishing the way the words fall off his own tongue. “You possess a gift so powerful you could have made even the Devil himself believe he was in love…”

He stops in his tracks. You rise to stand, an attempt to steady yourself, and you watch him. He doesn’t move for such a long minute. Until he finally turns to grin at you from over his shoulder.

“...If you hadn’t fallen in love with him first.”

Streaks of hot tears trickle down your tired face. You can’t bear to listen to this. You’re so, so tired. 

“Your greatest power became your greatest weakness, when you failed to recognize your own grave mistake,” he continues, a ghastly glow of red in the pits of his eye -- you watch your own terrified face contort in the reflection of his monocle -- “you didn’t realize it until it was too late -- "

He seizes your hand, holding it against the left side of his chest and you feel exactly what you knew you would feel --

Nothing.

“I don’t have a heart,” he grouses, mocking you, glistening goo dripping from between his fangs. “But _you do_. And when you realized how weak it became for me, you knew your plan would fail, you _fled_.” 

You can’t look at him, so you blur your vision with your tears, letting yourself cry. You whimper and whine and tremble with your hand still over the heart that he doesn’t have, feeling your own shatter to pieces.

“You fled, and in turn, lost your heart _and_ your soul -- to me. Both of them, to me. Tell me, did you really think you could run? Did you think you could _hide_ , from _me_?”

“If I failed so spectacularly, why did you bother to find me?” you spit back at him, anger rich and coursing through you now that you’ve nothing to lose. You wrangle yourself from his grasp and he watches you curiously, watching your forehead wrinkle and your eyes flare. “I know it wasn’t to brag, you don’t waste time like that. And I know it wasn’t for sex, you can get that anywhere you like, and you never liked me. I ran when I realized that. I’m using my powers to help heroes and I’m a threat, but if I were enough of one Flug woulda had me on a silver platter months ago, you woulda made sure of that. So _why_? What’s the point in all this? You gonna rip my heart out just like you did with my soul?”

Black Hat stares back at you through half-lidded eyes, sighing like you’ve just asked him the most ridiculous question he’d ever heard. He slides his gloves back on his fingers and shakes his head, quiet laughter rumbling low in his chest before it erupts from his mouth. 

“My darling, you of all people know I have no use for a heart.” 

With a snap of his fingers, Black Hat summons forth a tiny, glowing orb, and it rests in his palm. An unearthly and incomprehensible energy radiates from it. Your tears dry up. The color drains from your face. 

“I _was_ going to leave you alone, you know,” he starts, staring at the culmination of your soul with a pitying eye. “Oh, I was never going to give this back, mind you, once you sign your name in the Book, you are mine, and mine _forever_ \-- but I _was_ going to let you live your life in peace, give you a good twenty or thirty years before I ate this and fed off your power. But you just _had_ to make things so difficult for yourself, didn’t you? Fraternizing with heroes…”

Your soul floats between yourself and him, amber streaks of light dancing across the horrors of Black Hat’s dark face as you get to look at that smile one more time. 

“So I thought I’d have a little fun before **eating it** in front of you.”

The space shrinks even smaller. You don’t recognize the darkness anymore. You don’t recognize anything, no feelings, no existence -- there is only Black Hat.

Ever since you inked your name in the Book, there was only Black Hat.

“I used you, just like you tried and failed to use me, and the only thing I’ll ever love, is getting to _fucking tear you apart_ by consuming every bit of power your pathetic little soul has to offer me.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i can't make up my mind about what i really think black hat is, so we're going with ambiguous demonic abomination who probably replaced satan as king of hell, complete with horns, because that's hot, who wears corsets, because that's hot too
> 
> i have ~ideas~ about what bh does with souls, like depending on how he consumes yours, he could either eat you and feed off your power completely and kill you in the process, or he can essentially become your horcrux and you'll never die so long as he's consumed your soul. it's all really hand-wavy and i'm just fucking around here
> 
> i also have super ambiguous ideas about how he'd have sex, he's a shape shifter, i'm sure he could manifest sex organs any way he wanted, but i liked the idea of being restrained by phantom tendrils that could suck you into a web of shadows a lot
> 
> if you read this mess thank you i'm blowing you a kiss, everybody say prayers for new content soon


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